Hippie Homesteaders: Arts, Crafts, Music and Living on the Land in West Virginia

Communes and Intentional Communities

217 8 Communes and Intentional Communities Living in Harmony “O nce upon a time, a tribe of people went off into the woods, and nobody ever heard of them again.” These words, from the 1972 commune journal of West Virginia filmmaker, dancer, wood sculptor , maskmaker, and teacher, Jude Binder, could describe many communes from the 1960s through today. And in the instances where the commune did not survive, her quote is certainly prescient. Both the precise definition of a commune and the extent of the phenomenon are hard to pin down. For some, the term has a religious connotation ; for others, it screams socialism. Most folks agree, however, that they are planned communities whose members have common interests and in which property is often shared or owned jointly. Within this clear definition , their raisons d’être varied widely. However, from the well-chronicled Drop City commune in southeastern Colorado, where the dwelling of choice was a Buckminster Fuller-inspired geodesic dome, to the rural Virginia entrepreneurial hammock enterprise at Twin Oaks Farm, communes of the period usually shared the values of cooperation, nonviolence, equality , and ecology. For some, common interests were not enough. Strict governance ruled some communes, while others were highly amorphous. Some disintegrated over adherence to those rules, others over the lack thereof. While a scene of pot-smoking hippies engaging in nonstop orgies springs to many mainstream minds when a commune is mentioned, that 218 Chapter Eight was not the norm, according to Timothy Miller, chronicler of the 1960sera communes. Most set no rules about sexual activity, neither promoting free sex nor requiring abstinence; instead, they let members work it out for themselves. Thus, while frequent partner switching was rare, and group sex even more so, about anything imaginable did happen at one time or another in some commune, somewhere, he says.1 Drugs may have been another matter, though. Some believe that West Virginia’s soil was conducive to growing marijuana, thus providing a draw for the youth of the period, but there’s little documentation to prove this. Indeed, the communards and other back-to-the-landers had enough trouble growing food to sustain themselves; a pot crop would have taken up valuable land. This is not to say that some drugs weren’t tolerated, if not advocated, in the communes. But there was, according to Miller, a distinction between marijuana and other psychedelic drugs, and hard drugs like heroin or cocaine. The former, usually referred to as “dope,” was acceptable , while “drugs” were often banned.2 Timothy Miller, in his documentation for The 60s Communes: Hippies and Beyond, readily admits that a true count of those living communally in the 1960s and 1970s is impossible to achieve. He cites a New York Times article in 1970 that claimed nearly two thousand communes could be found in America, but admits the author did not justify how he arrived at his number.3 Miller also cites other articles of the time that reported two hundred communes in Philadelphia, two hundred Jesus communes in California, a thousand communal houses in New York City, two hundred to eight hundred in or near Berkeley, California, and two hundred in Vermont. On the other hand, he notes that scholars working on defining the movement gave much greater numbers; some said up to five thousand or ten thousand communes existed in rural America, with more in urban areas.4 Miller personally identified over one thousand communes in his own research, but he said he also heard of a great many others he could not name and that did not appear on any lists. If the common estimate of typical commune membership being between twenty and fifty persons is correct , and the number of actual communes is closer to several thousand— 219 Communes and Intentional Communities probably tens of thousands—the real population of communards could have been several hundred thousand, Miller calculated. Poet, literature professor, and former communard Judson Jerome, whom Miller called the most careful commune counter of all, arrived at a different number. According to Miller, in Jerome’s book on the subject, Families of Eden: Communes and the New Anarchism, he concluded that perhaps 250,000 persons had lived in urban communes not centered on any specific creed. Given that the creed-based communes probably equaled the non-creedal ones, the total number of urban communards equaled half a million by his count. Adding evidence he...